At the moment, it’s a disarmingly simple-looking beta that works only with webfonts*, but the initial preview version already takes you well beyond the scope of traditional live font-rendering.

What’s the Difference?

Though it looks like a blank page at first glance, the initial Tryout feature is in fact a powerful design tool. It’s a functioning layout template where you can create, delete, change and combine your rendered font samples freely. With its useful range of tools, you can play with the rendered font samples, changing their point sizes, line spacing and text alignment, and you can also change the colors of the text and background. You can design anything you want, using any webfonts of your choice. And every designer knows that a blank page is not just an empty space, but a wide open universe, full of unlimited potential. To start creating your own rendered layouts, just select the family of your choice, then click on the “Tryout” button.

Sharing is Collaboration

Naturally, you can “share” your designs with as many people as you like. But here’s a refreshing new twist: in our Tryout feature, “sharing” also means “collaborating”. Once you’ve “shared” your design with a person or a group, they can also edit it and send you back their changed versions, allowing you to work jointly on any design. This is not only extremely practical for professional use, it’s also a great opportunity for users to bounce around ideas and inspire each other. To try this feature, just create a design in the Tryout page, then click the “Share” button—and let the fun begin!

More in the Works

In upcoming versions, you can look forward to more Tryout templates, tailored for practical use-cases such as blog designs, book texts or websites. Soon you’ll also be able to browse them for new families, work with your “favorited” items, upload images and test out the finer capabilities of the fonts, such as OpenType features and much more.

Check it out. The next FontShop website is in beta. It’s raw. It’s unfinished. It’s in flux. But we’re launching it anyway.

Why? Because we love the new design, and we want YOU to help us shape its development. Seriously. The site at next.fontshop.com is an open invitation for you to explore, have fun and test out the simplified, playful new design.

And then we want you to let loose: tell us what you love about it, what you hate about it, and above all, tell us what you want us to add to it. As you submit ideas and requests, we’ll continue to build on the initial foundation-stone, regularly publishing new features and modules based on your feedback over the coming months.

It’s all part of an experiment in collaborative agile design, jointly conceived and fostered by FontShop and the creative minds at Edenspiekermann. Its purpose is to get you, the public, to participate in the design process, and help create the perfect place to find fonts.

In the true spirit of the project, we’re not even going to bother extolling the beauty and the simplicity of the design here. Instead, we say only: go see it for yourself. Form your own opinion. Then tell us what you think.

The Character Set option allows you to view the all the glyphs available in a specific font. A small arrow will appear in a glyph’s box if there are alternates characters for that glyph. You can click on the arrow to preview the alternates.

The Language Support option will show you all of the languages that the font will support. Typically fonts will support common languages like Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish.

We know you’re busy and the Internet is a crowded place, so we’ll try to give you a little reminder on Fridays of what’s going on out there. Below please find five recent FontShop-related threads that you may have missed.

7 Weeks Until TYPOHaven’t purchased your ticket yet to TYPO San Francisco? Well you probably should! Ticket sales will increase March 1 and WILL sell out this year. Save $100 and get yours today! Take a peek at who’s opening and closing each day on the blog.

Upgrade!Our product pages got a little revamping and are now easier to test, view and find related styles within a family.

Designers can now test out the thousands of webfonts from FontShop.com on existing websites, free of charge. FontShop International is pleased to introduce its WebFonter tool available at webfonter.FontShop.com.

Aiming to make the web design process as seamless as possible, WebFonter allows designers to “try before they buy,” by previewing actual typefaces in any existing site. The tool can be used as a Chrome extension, browser bookmarklet or by entering a URL directly at webfonter.fontshop.com.

WebFonter can be used during the design and development process – a critical time for font choice. The target website does not need to be publicly accessible in order to test-drive webfonts. This hugely important feature marries well with the current web design trend towards designing directly in the browser, and makes WebFonter an extremely useful and powerful tool.

By pairing Webfonter with the FontShop Plugin, designers can now easily preview fonts in the concept stage of design from print to web.

We’re taking fall fashion seriously in our San Francisco office. Today we launched a little makeover to the FontShop.com homepage. We hope this new look will better help you in finding the great fonts you love, discovering new typographic gems and accessing all of our design resources with fewer clicks. What do you think of our new page? Before and after shots below.

Our new look:

The “Before” shot:

Please note the changes are not visible in all FontShop territories yet. We’d love your feedback on what you’d like to see.

OurType is running their own set of great pairs this month, with half-off promotional pricing for a different pair each week. This week, get Corbeau & Tiina at 50% off. As always with OurType fonts, each package comes with webfonts included.

If you’ve ever wanted to see just a few letters together in a font or how a short phrase looks in a certain typeface, you can use our Custom Sample Toolbar.

There’s a small text field in the Custom Sample Toolbar that will say “Enter sample text…” — type in your phrase or the glyphs you want to see and remember to hit Return or Enter (your sample text will not render automatically as you type). Once you’ve pressed Enter, the fonts in your search result or FontList will render:

If you see blank spots or empty squares in place of a letter or glyph, then that means that font does not contain that specific character. This is more likely to happen if you enter sample text in a different language, but we do have many fonts that have wide language support.

If you need to compare how the text looks between certain fonts that aren’t right by each other in a list, you can Favorite the font and the font will be saved in your Favorites list with the sample text you originally previewed it in.

And don’t forget: for the majority of fonts that we do have available on FontShop, we have a plug-in that allows people to play around and test fonts within Adobe Creative Suite CS5 or higher (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign only) before buying — this is completely free and easy to download and use.

For those of you who have designers in your family or friends that would light up at the idea of some new swashes to play around with in Illustrator this holiday season, how about getting them a font that they’ve had their eye on? This may also be the chance to license some fonts for your parents to replace those dreaded system defaults on their old computer sitting in the living room at home.

If you’re thinking that licensing a typeface like Aranjuez Pro may be the best present for your loved ones, be sure that their name and address is under the Licensee Address information before placing your order — they will need to be licensed to use the font before you send it to them, so don’t forget to double-check this part!

Once you’ve added the fonts to your cart and entered your payment information, you’ll be able to change the Licensee information when you review your order on the Order Confirmation page. The Licensee Address will default to the primary address listed in your account, so you’ll need to change it if it’s still under your name. A link to change the Licensee Address will be under the second section with the Address Information; when you click to edit the Licensee info, you’ll be able to enter the new information. Be sure to fill in all required details!

When you’re done entering the new license address, click on the “Next” button and you’ll be able to complete your order. Since you’ll be getting the download link after completing your purchase, you’ll need to download the ZIP file with a copy of the EULA to give as a gift — send it off in an email the night before Christmas and wait for a fresh design with the newly licensed typeface!

Take a look at our Bestsellers and New Fonts to get some ideas of which fonts may be the best to gift this holiday season!

On the heels of adding new language filters, we’ve continued to improve sections of FontShop to help you more easily find the fonts you need.

We made additional improvements to the bestselling fonts page design, making it much more intuitive and fun for you to use. If you’ve ever wondered what France’s favorite new display fonts are, you can filter that far!

We also rolled out changes to the site on category pages (e.g. Script). These new filters not only help narrow your search, they’re pretty addictive to play with. You can see other examples by going to the main Category page and choosing “View All” under any category name.

What else would you like to see on the site? What’s your favorite way to browse for fonts?

Typefaces don’t all talk the same. We’ve heard from you that more information about what languages individual fonts support can make a big difference in choosing which packages would best fit with the projects you’re working on.

We’re excited to announce we’ve launched a solution, it’s still beta, but you can see some new features in a few places.

Language tabs

Visit the product pages (e.g. Paratype’s Orbi Sans Multilingual) and there’s now a new tab which lists which languages are supported. If you’re working with multiple or less commonly supported languages, you can make sure the single font you chose speaks the right one before you buy.

Sub-category pages

Pick a category (such as serif) and then filter the results based on language. This will return only those fonts that support the languages you’re seeking.

Bestsellers page

We’ve added an extra filter so you can now return just those results with that languages you use.

As always, if you have any suggestions on what changes to the site you’d like to see, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Thanks for all those who’ve shared their experiences with us so far. We want to hear more. Have you used the plugin to help you select just the right font for a project? Did you discover a typeface you hadn’t even known existed? How has the tool made your design flow easier? Submit your story here by 11:59 PM (PDT) on Monday, April 30 and we’ll select our favorites to win a free download of the FontBook app for iPad.

You asked for more search functionality on FontShop.com and we listened. Today we’re excited to launch search with live results on the site.

Once you’ve typed in at least three characters, font products will appear in the menu, sorted based on popularity. As you type, the search can tell the difference between designer, foundry, family and will group the results accordingly.

For example, if you start typing in “FF l” you’ll get a list beginning with the light weight of FF Din OT.

We hope this helps simplify your experience on the site and makes searching efficient and seamless, so you can get back to putting these fonts to work. Tell us what you think of this feature in the comments below.

You’ve heard about Web FontFonts, but if you’re still not sure what they are and how to use them then don’t fret. FontShop created a guide to get you up to date on what webfonts are and how to use Web FontFonts. Just go to our education page to view the guide online and if you need to brush up on your typography then we have guides for that too.

We’re excited to announce the addition of a more robust FontList tool on FontShop.com today. Now when you browse font packages, you’ll see a new tab marked “Show FontLists.” If the font is listed in any Fontlist, you’ll see a list of where else you can find it on the site. When you mouse over the FontList name, you’ll get a preview of the list.